William Hooke

Clinical posts from members and guests of the Australasian Society for HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexual Health Medicine (ASHM) from various international medical and scientific conferences on HIV, AIDS, viral hepatitis, and sexual health.

Origin and predictors of early repeat infections among HIV negative women with TV receiving a stat dose of 2g of Metronidazole.

I will speak mostly about the HCV study in Amsterdam, but I just wanted to quickly mention number one. Each topic was around 15 minutes long, so limited time for questions or follow up.

1. Michelle Cole from GASP (Gonococcal Antimicrobial Surveillance Program) spoke about how they are testing resistance to gonorrhoea with Ceftriaxone, Cefixime and on every third year Gentamicin.- Overall 2134 isolates were submitted from 24 countries and 1 x Ceftriaxone resistance was found.- Five isolates had high Azithromycin resistance in 2014, and there was a high amount of resistance found in Heterosexual men and MSM compared with females.

Conclusions; high but stable resistance to Azithromycin and low overall resistance to Ceftriaxone and Cefixime. The speaker had raised discussion points around possible resistance; ?Mono Therapy, Azithromycin for NGU or the high use of Azithromycin in general?

It was discussed that over the years, HCV emergence was noted in HIV+ MSM, not knowing why HIV- men were unaffected, questioning Biological, behavioural or network factors? The research question was asked; Is there HCV prevalence among MSM and Transgender persons starting PrEP, and do they cluster with HIV+ MSM?

Participants had a choice of daily or Event required PrEP (not available in Australia under trial). All were tested with HCV Antibody and HCV RnA.

People with HCV reported more CLARS than others who were HCV negative.

Chemsex was a high component.

Conclusion from the speaker was that HCV prevalence was higher than previously found with HIV negative MSM.

As EPIC data in Australia is still being collected and reviewed by the Kirby Institute, it will be interesting to see how our data compares to Amsterdam.

I spoke to Roel after the presentation and asked about continual testing and study with PrEP and if they noticed behavioural changes or rates of infection throughout PrEP, but this data was still not available for them also.